March’s FOMC minutes were released yesterday...and while they were interesting, what was said in the last meeting wasn’t too terribly surprising.

The minutes show that Fed policymakers were worried that a “deep” recession, rather than a “shallow” one, would permeate the U.S. economy, which spurred them to cut the key interest rate by three-quarters of a percentage point.

The Fed was mostly united in their decision to cut the key lending rate, except for two dissenters, Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser and Dallas Fed chief Richard Fisher.

While the majority saw the rate cut as the right decision since “further restriction of credit availability and ongoing weakness in the housing market made a severe downturn a strong possibility,” Plosser and Fisher thought otherwise. The hawks were more comfortable with smaller cuts because of the concern that an inflationary flare-up would occur.

MSNBC reports: “On the one hand, the Fed has been urgently moving to prevent the trio of economic woes – housing, credit and financial – from plunging the country into deep recession. On the other hand, with soaring energy prices and high food costs, policymakers realize they can’t afford to let inflation out of control, either.”

The financial media and experts are placing bets that the Fed will chose to cut rates again next month, as the economy has yet to reach its final bottom.

“There’s no question the U.S. economy is one of the weakest in the world,’’ Stephen Koukoulas, a London-based global strategist at TD Securities, a unit of Toronto-Dominion Bank, Canada’s third-largest bank, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “We do need the policy makers, the Fed and even the administration to come in and kick-start the economy. It’s probably going to get worse before it gets better.”

*** Alan Greenspan has been popping up all over the press lately – after 18 years of Greenspeak, it looks like the former Fed chief wants to set the record straight...at least from his point-of-view.

“I have no regrets on any of the Federal Reserve policies that we initiated back then because I think they were very professionally done,” Mr. Greenspan told CNBC yesterday.

And to the Journal , he said: “I don’t remember a case when the process by which the decision making at the Federal Reserve failed.”

The Financial Times recently ran a piece titled, “The fed is blameless on the property bubble.” James Saft, writing for Reuters says that Big Al argued that the epic bubble was not caused by loose monetary policy, but by “the fall in global long-term interest rates, which, as chairman...of the most powerful central bank in the world, apparently had nothing to do with him.”

Albert Edwards, global strategist at Societe Generale Cross Asset Research in London puts it bluntly: “He was the midwife of serial bubbles that are unraveling.”

Former Fed chief Paul Volcker remains unconvinced by Greenspan’s protests, questioning his cheerleading of the “bright new financial system,” that “for all its talented participants, for all its rich rewards, has failed the test of the marketplace.”

And in a speech to the members of the Economic Club of New York, Volcker chided Bernanke for “toeing ‘the very edge’ of the bank’s legal authority in orchestrating last month’s bailout of beleaguered investment bank Bear Stearns,” reports The New York Times .

“Out of perceived necessity, sweeping powers have been exercised in a manner that is neither natural nor comfortable for a central bank,” Volcker said.

Bill Bonner is the President of Agora Publishing. For more on Bill Bonner, visit The Daily Reckoning.